The meaningfully meaningless meaning of meaning

I wanted to call this post simply, "Is", but I resisted. It'd make it too difficult to search for in the future, anyway.

All this AI stuff has provoked a lot (1) of discussion (2) as to whether AI can really be said to be "understanding" anything. Does it truly extract the meaning of anything, or is it only a glorified abacus, shuffling the text around in impressive yet ultimately vacuous ways ?

As befits this blog, my stance on this is conflicted. Since I believe very strongly that we have an inner awareness which arises from something that can't be reduced to mere words, in some ways I'm inclined towards the latter. Just rearranging words in the correct order does not constitute a mind of any sort. Likewise, playing all the notes even in the right order doesn't indicate the presence of emotions or intent.

On the other hand, I've long speculated that a purely text-based machine could be said to have a form of understanding, even if necessarily different from our own. It wouldn't necessarily be conscious, but it could still be important - indeed, maybe even preferable to recreating a truly living machine, which would have all kinds of no-doubt horrific emotions and be utterly unfathomable. A ruthlessly unbiased, objective truth engine is in some ways considerably more appealing, though there are of course tremendous difficulties with the very notion.

What is that we mean when we say "meaning" or "understanding" ? In one recent discussion (2), two possibilities were given, which I quote verbatim :

1. That evocation of sensory-emotional-cognitive content elicited by a bit of language within a language user.
2. Having an effective representation of one’s little corner of the world. By effective it is meant being competent in using one’s learned model to interact with the world. Meaning is as meaning does.

And a third, closely related question :

3.  Has a painting or other work of art ever had a powerful effect on you? A natural vista? We can legitimately say that these interacted meaningfully with you though these have no purported understanding of language.

I've done a piece looking at this before, but in a more moral context rather than one about cognition.  To quote myself :

For a thing to be meaningful it has to have a connection to something else. The more or stronger the connections, the more meaningful it is, and vice-versa. An utterly meaningless activity would be something that doesn't affect anything else entirely in any way whatsoever, like a subatomic particle which emerges from the quantum foam for a picosecond and then goes away again (or one of Ricky Gervais' Flanimals, which "does absolutely nothing and dies"). ... If, for some strange reason, he [some random dude] achieves some mental well-being as a result of his pointless polishing, then it's not really pointless or meaningless at all. It's not necessarily deeply meaningful, but it has some meaning.

This could also apply to severing or weakening connections just as well as creating or strengthening them; loss can be some of the most meaningful experiences of all. And where I've speculated* about meaning in the sense of understanding*, I go along similar lines :

* Both of those links are worth re-reading, containing skepticism of GPT3 from 2020 which now looks utterly ridiculous. In two or three years the output has gone from mainly dribble to mainly coherent - borderline mainly correct. The authors of the pieces I quoted in the links pronounced judgement far, far too soon ! See my follow up from shortly afterwards where I first got to play with GPT3 myself.

My working definition is that understanding is knowledge of the connections between a thing and other things. The more complete our knowledge of how things interact with other things, the better we can say we understand them... I noted that this isn't a perfect definition, since my knowledge of mathematical symbols, for example, does not enable me to really understand - let alone solve - an equation.

Sometimes, I can understand all the individual components of a system but not how the whole lot interact. [I might be able to do] each individual calculation myself (just more slowly), but not the whole bunch all together. That suggests there's some numerical limit on how many connections I can hold at once. I could fully understand each one, but not how they all interact at the same time.

Likewise, electronic circuits : in undergraduate studies they gave us a circuit diagram to solve which wasn't all that complex, just four diodes linked in a weird way, but my brain said, "nope, that's completely non-linear, can't do that". I just can't handle more than a few variables in my head simultaneously, which imposes quite hard limits on what I can understand. Processing speed might also be a factor.

This is all well and good, but I got hung up on the limitations of this approach, particularly in regard to knowledge and the base units within the web of facts that could construct an understanding :

But subtleties arise even with this simplest form of misunderstanding. In a straightforwardly linear chain of processes, a computer may only increase the speed at which I can solve a problem. Where the situation is more of a complex interconnected web of processes, however, I may never be able to understand how a system works, because there may just not be any root causes to understand : properties may be emergent from a complex system which I have no way of guessing. The real difficulty is when we don't understand a single, irreducible fact. We can know that fact, but that's not the same as understanding it, not really. How do we program such a state in software ?

Maybe this is too ambitious, however. Perhaps it's even impossible, perhaps there exists some basic atomic unit of knowledge which simply can't be reduced any further (this is very Locke). 

My thinking today though is a bit different. If we simply take it for granted that understanding is knowing how a thing relates to other things, perhaps we can unify all this. Now this is of course a paradox because it's self-referential : knowing is understanding, understanding is knowing, ad infinitium... so I throw myself on the reader's mercy and ask you to accept this most basic limitation. I need you to grant some very much deeper aspect to "knowledge" which I here cannot tackle, that we must proceed without attempting a more reductive approach or we will get nowhere.

Under this system, the two definitions given above can maybe be reconciled. The first would be that "meaning" is knowing how an external thing relates to our internal perception of it. Very similarly, "understanding" in this sense would mean knowledge of how words and text, and language, in general relate to qualia, emotions, and mental concepts (ultimately expressions of the deepest mental processes, electrochemical activities and so on).

In this version, it makes no sense at all to speak of an AI as having any sort of "understanding", because, as from thread (1) :

Their encodings do not represent any real "meaning", even abstractly. The "meaning" is in us, not in the LLM.

A language model cannot possible encode meaning in the sense of our inner awareness because it simply doesn't have one. In this definition, to say an AI "understands" something is completely ludicrous.

The second definition is more about competence, knowing which thing relates to which other things in order to produce useful results. In this sense, there's no problem at all postulating that a language model can be said to have understanding, because knowledge of how verbs and adjectives relate to each other is clearly part of this, even if only a small part of human cognition.

To me all of these seem like different expressions of the same thing. The "moral" sense of meaning, as we might get from a painting or a landscape or a speech, relates to how something affects our own internal processes. Something invokes "meaning" if it affects more of those internal connections ("wow, this picture of a windmill changes both my view of both impressionist art and 16th century agriculture !") or a few of them more strongly ("this destroys my theory of impressionist art altogether, however my views on farming haven't changed"). By contrast the "competence" model is just about different connections, the ones which are based primarily on the stuff "out there" that have little direct subjective effect on our emotional states. Both, I suggest, are fundamentally about how things relate to other things.

And both of these seem completely reasonable to me. As I discuss at some length in (1), I think it's entirely valid to say that large language models can be said to have a type of understanding, though it definitely isn't the human sort. They can operate very successfully, though not perfectly, on complex text; they can deal with the connections between words of different types. As our moral-type of understanding relates to connections in our own internal awareness, and our knowledge-type of understanding concerns connections between external objects*, so does a LLM's understanding consist of connections between elements of text.

* Or, if you insist : our own internal representations of external objects.

This to me seems perfectly straightforward, useful, and self-consistent. I don't think the suggestion in (1) that I'm applying different standards is correct :

You say you do not understand higher maths - You can’t apply it in novel ways, you don’t know why you use it like you’re supposed to use it, it’s just rote learning. From this your internal-use definition of “understanding” would seem to mean “understanding why something works to the point of being able to apply it in novel situations”.

But for ChatGPT, you’re applying something much less as necessitating understanding. ChatGPT is literally just generating words according to pattern prediction. The situations are novel, but only with respect to the topic - it is not novel in terms of word patterns or subject (if you find a subject that the bot has no training material for, it will not do well).

Just like midjourney is mimicking pencil strokes or brush strokes, so are the chat bots mimicking known text. That is something very far from the idea of understanding you use for yourself.

I take the point, but this it not my definition of understanding at all. Because to me this is all about different connections, I do not see any difficulty with claiming that "chatbots make connections between elements of text" as a type of understanding, with human understanding being something which involves connections to our own internal models. It's all about different types of connections, which are of fundamentally different natures in humans and chatbots : but in that crucial way, also fundamentally similar. The strands may be of silk or silicon, but the structure can be similar. 

Understanding in the broadest sense doesn't need a connection to a subjective awareness. And when a human misunderstands something, they fail to make the necessary connections. When a chatbot gets an answer wrong, it fails to make the necessary connections. Sure, it can't apply itself to novel situations, but humans stumble here as well. When we see an observation that doesn't fit the existing paradigm, we run into a horrible mess before we figure it out. A bot's version of understanding is strictly linguistic : it is not reasoning in the sense of coming up with wholly new concepts. I claim nothing more than that it understands text itself, not the subject matter. I don't doubt that a bot trained only on text about lettuce would come up with some... interesting stuff if asked about nuclear fusion*.

* Somebody please do this.

The weird thing here is the apparent belief that people think even this is anthropomorphising. It isn't, and if anything it's the opposite. It's simply broadening the definition of understanding to something I think is self-consistent with existing use. Human understanding just becomes a subset of this, but is not diminished in any way, nor are chatbots elevated to have something they clearly do not have (though, this is quite fun).

Here at last is where I think we have problems with the word "is". Materialism says that consciousness literally is something physical, that the flow of electrons in the brain (say) literally is thought itself. Physicalism says it's not an actual material substance, but still something physical, e.g that electrical fields are thoughts. Functionalism is somewhat broader but still boils down to "consciousness is whatever the brain is doing", that you can literally define things by their purpose... a chair is that which is for sitting; in sociology, society is defined by its goals; thinking is that which arises from the brain. Or in another thread :

Functionalism is just another way of saying that things exist at various levels of abstraction. And still be “real” at each level of abstraction. For example an algorithm is real even though that’s just a functional abstraction or any of many ways to implement the algorithm. Some people say the implementation is real and the abstraction isn’t. Word games.

I think that things do exist at different levels of abstraction, but they cannot be equally or equivalently "real" (the quotes are vital !) at each level. The kind of existence of the concept of a chair is wholly different to the wooden kind you can actually sit on. Even if there was a direct one-to-one relationship between brain waves and mental states, I think it would make not a lick of sense to say that they are the same thing. I think there is an unbridgeable gulf between the two. A thing is not its function; a function can only describe a thing in part, the two cannot literally be equal. To say understanding is the deeper processes within the brain (and only those) seems curiously limited to me.

In like vein, I find it a bit weird to define the supernatural out of even conceptual existence. Saying anything that occurs is natural by definition is to my way of thinking missing the point entirely. Defining understanding to be something only the mind or brain can do similarly doesn't seem useful. It just seems unnecessarily limiting. Grand unified theories seem to be a dream of philosophers as much as physicists. 

As to the problem of knowledge = understanding, perhaps, as in the last link, this is also something that just cannot be reduced to anything fundamental, or maybe we can only define things in relation other things. I don't know. This I will have to leave for another day. Or maybe I'll just ask a chatbot to figure it out for me instead.

EDIT : This post generated a lively discussion here (3). Together especially with (1), I think we can at least properly pin down the point of dispute even if we can't fully resolve it.

The interpretation I favour is that understanding is a process, specifically of forming connections. I actively deny that the type of understanding an AI has is the same as the human sort, but at the same time, I think it perfectly valid to say a pure textual understanding, even if using nonsense words, is a type of understanding. Text can be said to "mean" something to an AI in that (and only in that) it knows how it relates to other text.

The major alternative seems to be that understanding must account not just for the process but what's being processed. Human understanding relates language to both external sensory stimuli and internal, non-linguistic mental processes. In that sense I fully agree that no AI could be said to have anything remotely comparable to human ideas of meaning. This latter sense of the word has the major advantage in that it opens an avenue to what we mean when say we understand an irreducible fact, allowing connections to that internal, non-computational reality.

Both of these definitions have value. The point of contention is whether "understanding is processing connections" is too broad a definition, and if in fact "understanding is the processing of connections between language and mental states" (say) is already a fait accompli. To me the process is more important than what's being processed; whether one is boiling water or boiling milk, the important thing is that something is boiling. 

It's a (different) kind of magic

Existential Comics is one of my favourite webcomics, but this one's got me thinking. In the accompanying description :

The term "supernatural" is kind of funny because by definition it sort of means things that don't exist. If something exists, it is part of the natural world, in that it can interact with particles via the rules of physics. If ghosts exist, for example, they can't so much disobey the laws of physics, because scientists would simply adjust the rules of physics to match what they observed in the ghosts. 

Which then goes on to insist that the supernatural must mean things that don't exist by definition. 

Don't get me wrong, this is, as usual, an amusing comic. But I don't think it's at all accurate - I think it's circular and misses the point. The supernatural has nothing much at all to do with “existence” and instead relates to whether such phenomena do obey rigorous laws or not. To me, just because something "exists", in the sense of "being detectable", in no way implies that this is so because it is bound by any scientific rules. Indeed, that's kind of the whole point. Ordinary, mortal creatures are seen because they reflect or omit photons; a creature which was visible to our eyes without doing this would be magical by definition. If you forbid this possibility utterly, saying that there's no way our vision can work in any other way, you've misunderstood the whole notion, and have probably fallen into scientism.

Some examples and further exploration may help. Existential Comics goes on to cite Bigfoot, the Kraken and other mysterious creatures. Now Bigfoot, an undiscovered American ape, isn’t inherently supernatural, but if Bigfoot could behave in such a way as to defy any rational, scientific analysis, then it might be. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be 100% supernatural 100% of the time in 100% of the things it did, there would just have to be some inexplicable aspect to it. 

And to be fair, cryptid animals often do contain a large helping of the truly supernatural about them. A serious academic researcher looking for possible escaped big cats in Britain doesn't entertain the possibility that the Beast of Bodmin has any unearthly qualities to it, but cryptozoologists do. I read a whole bunch of this stuff in my younger days, everything from aliens and monsters to time travel and frickin' Mothman, which is basically where I gave up.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, there's a whole spectrum from the basically respectable to the outright nonsensical. There are those trying to get good, scientific data to prove the existence of unknown but essentially normal species, there are those whole believe that new physics might be found in ball lightning... and then there are the folklorists. Not in the sense of those who study folklore, but those who really believe in it, hook line and sinker. The kind of people who believe the Beast of Bodmin has inexplicable powers, that the yeti isn't just a peculiar ape, but has something genuinely monstrous about it; the demon-bear in The Terror is an excellent example. Ambiguity, mystery and inexplicability are a key part of the the sense of underlying threat for such creatures.

But none of these "researchers" claim that supernatural entities don't exist, because that's just silly. This is an attempt to define the issue away, but I think this is just purely circular logic that avoids the issue rather than addressing it. It makes a good comic, but nothing more.

So what does "supernatural" really mean, then ? You might recall that time I tried to imagine being a ghost, with a view to examining that ever-popular topic of consciousness and minds. We'll get back to that angle later. But to tackle the supernatural itself, I have no conceptual problem with something that interacts with the observable world but is not bound by its rules. Why would something which interacts in some ways therefore necessarily have to obey all the regular rules of ordinary matter ?

It wouldn't. Dark matter pretty much does this, and nobody thinks it's anything mystical (well, except for Philip Pullman, I guess). To be more accurate, it doesn't interact with normal matter except through gravity, but there's no reason to think that it all other respects it somehow defies physics. Quite the opposite : the physics is if anything likely to be simpler than ordinary matter, which is why it's computationally very cheap to simulate. But it's only a short conceptual step from this to imagine something which can interact with the world enough to make itself detected, but in other ways is outside physical laws completely. I'm just not seeing anything fundamentally problematic about this as a concept, even without believing myself that any such thing exists.

The other example that comes speeding into view is obviously consciousness itself. Could we view this as something magical ? Yes, if we want to. I actually do tend to think of this - in a very casual sense - as an everyday sort of routine magic, mind over matter so continuously at work that we take it for granted. And perhaps that is even literally true. But it need not necessarily be so; as I'm often at pains to point out, this is something which does seem to fit the bill of pointing to a gap in our knowledge, rather than anything that truly breaks science. Our ability to think about concepts which don't have physical existence clearly doesn't give us any special control over the world - it's a rather oddly-limited sort of "magic" if all it lets us do is walk around the place and experience ennui.

True magic would be something that was fundamentally inexplicable through physical laws, that fit no pattern whatsoever, or that happened with no connection of any kind between the apparent cause and its effect. Magical spells are a classic example : there's no way that chanting around a cauldron full of boiling newts can cause someone in a nearby castle to turn into a frog. There's just no possible causal connection between these two events. On a James Randi forum many years back there was a guy who claimed he could make UFOs appear on demand by pointing at the sky; that would fit the bill pretty well too.

Mind might be described as truly magical if it could cause such nonlocal effects. Or, perhaps, if it were really the base level of reality, as idealism posits. In that sense the Ultimate Mind that imagines reality would not be bound by any of the laws that we ourselves feel subject to. Actually, a few weeks ago, I had ChatGPT create a discussion between Morogth and Daniel Dennet on this very point, and it raised much the same argument as Existential Comics did :

Daniel Dennett : Morgoth, I understand that you have witnessed the power of the Ainur, but have you considered that this power might not be supernatural at all, but rather the result of natural processes that we have yet to understand fully?

Morgoth : What are you talking about, Dennett? I was there when the world was created. I saw the song of the Ainur shape the universe with my own eyes.

Daniel Dennett : Yes, but consider this : what if the universe operates according to a set of natural laws that we can study and understand ? What if the power you wield is simply the result of these laws, rather than some kind of divine magic ?

Morgoth : I see what you're saying, but how can you explain the power of the Ainur ? How can you explain the very act of creation itself ?

Daniel Dennett : That's the thing, Morgoth. We might not be able to explain it fully yet, but that doesn't mean it's supernatural. It just means we haven't discovered the underlying natural laws that govern the universe.

The thing is, if the Universe were literally sung into being as in Tolkien's cosmology, I think this would be inexplicable by physical laws. In short, there do exist possibilities which, if demonstrated, I would seriously consider abandoning science and giving up. To cling to rationality in the face of manifestly irrational processes is itself irrational; to try and insist by definition that everything must obey physical laws would be foolishly circular if observational evidence indicated the contrary.

In Tolkien's mythology and Berkeley's philosophy (also Spinoza, the Upanishads, no doubt very many others !), the base level of reality is mind, which is ultimately how the magic works. This is also essentially how Neo can fly and stop bullets in The Matrix. I've compared idealism to the simulation hypothesis before, but there is an important distinction between the two : true, from the perspective of a simulated entity, I as the simulator might appear godlike, but it doesn't follow that I am the base level of that entity's reality. In the simulation hypothesis, if anything the opposite would be the case, that it would be equally likely that I myself am a simulation, and so on ad infinitum... simulations all the way down.

Which raises the question, what is the base level of reality ? Here it's worth reading this very nice little piece from IAI, which postulates that... maybe there just isn't one. Either reality could be infinite, not necessarily fractal but of infinite complexity on all scales, or it could just be self-referential. I'll reverse the order, because infinitism is in some ways the easiest to contemplate (or at least the most familiar to me) :

There are two primary alternatives to foundationalism, the view that reality does have a fundamental level. The second is infinitism, which endorses the possibility of infinite descent and hence infinite chains of dependence. For the infinitist picture to be palatable, we need to abandon the intuition that dependence needs to bottom out in something fundamental. As we saw earlier that intuition is generally tied to explanation. However, it may be driven simply by our psychological need to find the ultimate explanation. While infinite regresses are generally regarded as an alarming sign in philosophy, not all regresses or infinite sequences need to be vicious. 

There is an intriguing, hypothetical version of infinitism that could in principle be corroborated by empirical evidence. This version, sometimes called boring infinite descent, suggests that while chains of dependence could go on infinitely, there could be a point where the entities or the structure involved in these chains starts repeating; it’s turtles all the way down. The thought here is that a full-blown version of infinitism seems very demanding: if each level has a new kinds of entities governed by some hitherto undiscovered laws, then not only would there be infinite chains of dependence, but also an infinite number of different kinds of entities and laws.

I've no idea what's "boring" about this but I'm reliably informed the jargon just gets even weirder and sillier. No matter. Anyway, as far as "batshit crazy" goes, I like this very much : infinite levels of reality each with their own different laws, avoiding the tired cliché of having infinite copies of me (no pesky repeating fractals or the like) and preventing stuff from ever bottoming out. The reason that some things can't be reduced any further is not because they're truly fundamental, some "end of the line" point beyond which there are no more answers*, but because on scales below this things are radically different to the point of being incomparable. This is very appealing indeed. A webcomic version can be found here.

* I would yearn to know the Ultimate Answer, but I have great trouble imagining how this could even be a thing. 

But, while we're on the subject of gloriously crazy ideas, the other option is even more outrageous :

The first is coherentism, which suggests that we should take a more holistic view, whereby the foundation of reality could be constituted by entities that are themselves dependent on each other, in a symmetric fashion. 

For instance, quarks do not exist independently; they come in groups of two or three, such as in the case of mesons (group of two), and protons and neutrons (groups of three). So, you do not get freely existing quarks, simples though they may be. This immediately suggests that quarks lack one of the defining features that are typically ascribed to fundamentalia, namely, independence. In some sense, the quarks in these quark pair or triplets seem to be symmetrically dependent on each other… Ultimately, this could lead to a completely circular picture, where everything, or at least all the candidate fundamentalia, end up being dependent on each in a circular fashion.

I bloody love this. And I hate it too. Just have things defined entirely by other things ? That's... bold. You'd have something akin to fundamentalia but not really, there would be no single base component of reality, only base relations. That's going to need some more follow-up, but not right now. My instinctive suspicion would be that this can't work, but I'm not going to attempt to say why.

Which brings me to the final article I'll mention in this increasingly-meandering post :

A realist approach is one that takes the old-fashioned point of view that what is real in nature is not dependent on our knowledge or description or observation of it. It simply is what it is and science works by observing evidence or a description of what the world is. I’m saying this badly, but a realist theory is one where there is a simple conception, that what is real is real and [not] depend[ent] on knowledge or belief or observation. Most importantly, we can find out facts about what’s real and we draw conclusions and reason about it, and therefore decide. It isn’t a way most people thought of science before quantum mechanics.

The other kind of theory is an anti-realist theory. It’s one that says there are no atoms independent of our description of them or our knowledge of them. And science is not about the world as it would be in our absence—it’s about our interaction with the world and so we create the reality that science describes. And many approaches to quantum mechanics are anti-realist. These were invented by people who didn’t think there was an objective reality–instead, they understood reality to be determined by our beliefs or our interventions in the world.

The key idea, in society as well as physics, is that we must be relationalists as well as realists. That is, the properties we believe are real are not intrinsic or fixed, rather they concern relationships between dynamical actors (or degrees of freedom) and are themselves dynamical. This switch from Newton’s absolute ontology to Leibniz’s relational view of space and time has been the core idea behind the triumph of general relativity. I believe this philosophy also has a role to play in helping us shape the next stage of democracy, one suited to diverse, multicultural societies, which are continually evolving.

To recap from an earlier post, "there are no things, only stuff". All our understanding is flawed due to our limited perception, atoms aren't "real", they are just, in effect, labels for things which are real, whose true nature cannot be known to us. Maybe.

Leaving aside the question of the nature of the "stuff", what about the rules that govern the stuff ? Could they be said to be, in any sense, "real" ?

I think science in general assumes that they can. That nature operates on a fundamental set of inviolable principles, with our attempts at ascertaining what they are becoming progressively more accurate the more we learn, the more knowledge we have to develop our models from. The point is that some sort of rules do exist, even if might never grasp them perfectly. Whether this would imply determinism I don't know, but I suspect not, as in the last post, I think there is a valid space between the purely deterministic and purely random.

Which brings us back to magic. Something which violates an inviolable rule would count as magical. This may not necessarily be a logical contradiction, in that all ordinary matter might obey these inviolable laws (in relation to itself) but some other entities might not. This raises yet another definition of magic, that of different levels of reality following distinctly different but internally self-consistent rules. Hence the idea that you can go to a school for witches and wizards and learn how magic works : it would actively violate laws which otherwise are unbreakable, but is still limited by its own set of rules, much as in the "boring infinite descent" described above. Terry Pratchett made the point that all fantasy novels have to have rules for how magic works to avoid magic being the solution to everything*.

* Though I've heard it claimed that in the medieval period, the point about witchcraft was that it broke the normal rules of how the world worked, and the idea that you could go to a school with teachers and homework exercises to learn how to do it just wouldn't have made any sense. However, I can't remember where I heard this, and I can't find any references to it.

In this sense, we could consider almost everything magical. Atoms are magically miniscule because they operate on different principles from macroscopic reality; they experience all kinds of effects that we just don't. Conversely, galaxies are magnificently magical for exactly the same reason. It's only we, in this Middle Earth, that lack any sort of magic because we understand our own set of rules far better than those on any other scale.

Well, that was fun. To summarise the different kinds of magic considered, magic could be :

• When something interacts with us (or the world around us) by a mechanism other than the typical, well-understood methods of interaction
• When something behaves in such a way that is actively prohibited by known laws of physics, without any sort of pattern or following any rules whatsoever
• When something induces an effect without any physical connection of any kind, with no causal relation
• In general, when something does anything that is considered impossible, and no solution can be found to incorporate it into the known laws of physics, nor any problem found with those laws
• Or, when something operates on an entirely different set of its own rules that are present but inapplicable to our own lived experience. 

Some types of magic could indeed point to simply gaps in our knowledge, "any sufficiently advanced technology" and all that. But personally, I don't have a problem with the idea that some things just might not obey any laws at all and still exist - even if I don't actually believe in any of them.

Free Willfully

It seems to me that one of many odd tensions on social media concerns free will. On the one hand, people insist that most wrong actions are the result of innately awful people. The default assumption seems to be that people act malevolently, choosing to cause harm for the sheer delight of it, and not out of simple ignorance.

On the other hand, science activists on social media tend to deny that anyone can ever make a choice at all, that everything must be either predetermined, that the laws of physics are really immutable Laws that cannot ever be circumvented - or at most that there's an element of pure randomness to it all, but that actual deliberate choice is something weird and mystical.

Why this insistence against common sense ? I'm not sure. But Malcom Gaskill's marvellous books on witch-hunts have left me wondering how much of the old Calvinist mindset has persisted into the subconscious of modern America. Even those who actively reject religious beliefs cannot escape their cultural influence pervading wider society. Certainly the inherently conflicted nature of those beliefs does strike a chord with me when I see some of the abject lunacy coming from across the pond. 

Might it be that a belief in determinism is a manifestation of this, a holdover from a much earlier era of Calvinist puritanism ? It does often feel like people want to attack other people for the sake of it; rather than correcting their mistakes they just want to remove them from the arena altogether (as though they're locked in to their behaviour and incapable of change), even when those same people are actively trying to redeem themselves. 

But I digress. Personally I think free will is very much a thing; whether there is some "mystical" component to it I don't know, but I don't think there is any real need to invoke something supernatural to explain it (more on that in the next post). 

As I see it, not everything can be quantified or even measured. Yet the mind is, by some as-yet unknown process, capable of accessing this non-physical aspect of reality. I don't see anything especially "mystical" about feelings like guilt or sensory experiences like yellowness, but these things are not physically measurable. There doesn't appear to me to be any obvious need to say that because we can experience boredom, and particles of boredom don't exist, we need to believe in voodoo or the Tooth Fairy. It points to a gap in our knowledge, but nothing more than that. Anyway, by being able to act on something unphysical, this allows for the prospect of choice which defies determinism, since the information we act on is purely mental and not external to us.

So I'm gratified to have come across a couple of recent articles which are at least more sympathetic to the prospect of free will than most seem to be. The first is this short piece from The Conversation. It has quite a nice (but very brief) description of determinism, but the main take-away point for me is :

Suppose again that determinism is incompatible with free will. If so, when you freely moved your finger, that event was not fully determined by the initial conditions of the Universe and the laws of nature. Does it necessarily follow that it’s random? On the face of it, no. To be random is one thing; to be not fully determined is quite another. There’s a logical space between determinism and randomness, and perhaps free will lives in that space.

Making a choice doesn't mean you act randomly or entirely unpredictably, because that's clearly not what people are like : if I start voting Tory, my identity would have to undergo a seismic shift, and this is not at all the same as saying I had a choice. Rather, what I believe is going on is (in part) that I act on those inner mental worlds which for me define the concept of a mind. It's not external, physical reality that dictates my actions but my inner life : if I see a symbol and interpret it as meaning "five", I act differently to if I read it as "seven", regardless of what the symbol actually is. 

And the choice I make is not a compulsion. If I make consistent choices it's because my desires are consistent. Sure, you can predict this based on my past behaviour, but this will never be 100% accurate, because you can never truly know what my inner world is really like. Even I can't, because some of this is subconscious. Again, this position in between randomness and determinism is nothing weird. A Galton board, though purely deterministic, is a pretty good analogy to this : the behaviour is statistically predictable but nigh-on impossible to get it 100% accurate for individual runs. The either/or options of randomness or determinism are a false choice when it comes to the issue of free will : it's neither of those things.

The second article is from Scientific American. It says that something I've suggested for years is true : that when you make idle, inconsequential decisions, you experience different brain activity than when your decisions really matter. So the way you make those decisions involves fundamentally different processes, and that even if you can predict them through brain scans (about which I still reserve skepticism), this may only be because you're not actually making a choice in those instances. Rather the brain is just selecting something at random on your behalf, with no need to trouble your conscious mind about it. 

The other point from the article is that even from a materialist perspective (which I don't share), you can still be said to be making a choice :

When experiments have found that brain activity, such as the readiness potential, precedes the conscious intention to act, some people have jumped to the conclusion that they are “not in charge.” They do not have free will, they reason, because they are somehow subject to their brain activity. But that assumption misses a broader lesson from neuroscience. “We” are our brain. The combined research makes clear that human beings do have the power to make conscious choices. But that agency and accompanying sense of personal responsibility are not supernatural. They happen in the brain, regardless of whether scientists observe them as clearly as they do a readiness potential.

Even though I think the idea that brain activity = mental activity is nonsensical, I find it interesting that the materialistic view has more in common with my own opinions than I would have guessed. If I can tear myself away from Tolkien for long enough, expect a fuller write-up on this at some point. But coming next : the supernatural. Wooo-ooooo !

Wild-eyed Wild Isles

Much nonsense was reported about the final bonus episode of the BBC's Wild Isles recently. This didn't air on broadcast TV but was limited to iPlayer, which prompted the Guardian et al. to cry "right wing government cover-up", and claimed that "reputable sources" had told them it was because the BBC feared being too critical of the Tories.

Now these concerns are not without validity in the wake of the Richard Sharp debacle* and Gary Lineker's escapades, but in this particular instance, it was total nonsense. This extra feature was never part of the main show but commissioned by the RSPB, WWF and the National Trust. It was never scheduled to broadcast, and the show was described as five episodes in length on the RSPB and WWF's own websites. The whole furore was a bunch of bollocks.

* A case of very, very obvious conflict of interest. Good that he resigned, but disappointing that he refuses to see what's right in front of his face.

Not the show itself, though. That's superb. The main run of five episodes is up to the usual exemplary standards of Attenborough... but, it is a shame that the special didn't broadcast. It’s very much worth watching (available on Prime outside the UK, I believe), and contains nothing that attacks the government in any way. But I'm not going to do a detailed rundown of the episode. Instead, I need to go a bit more of a rant.

For once, the doom-laden tone of how badly the British environment has fared is kept to necessary minimum. Instead, the focus is on regeneration schemes, including, unexpectedly, cases where meat production can actually be beneficial for carbon capture, and where improving biodiversity is good for profits. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll reiterate : this positive approach in nature documentaries is badly needed. There have been a few others over the last year or so but the more the merrier. There is no longer any point - any point whatsoever - in the “doom porn” that too often characterises documentaries about environmentalism; I know the situation is bad, restating that in endlessly detailed and varied ways about exactly how bad things are serves no purpose. It just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy : everything is fucked, so why take any action ? Sure, let’s just all wallow in our own self-loathing, but the hell point is that supposed to achieve besides making everyone psychologically damaged ?

Well for one thing it’s not fucked. It isn’t. The environment is extremely robust if you give it half a chance, and herein are presented ways of living with nature rather than the typical binary “them or us” choice that oft-characterises environmentalism. Too often it seems to me that there is no small number of people who take a perverse delight in resharing every single “everything is awful” articles and must at some level actually enjoy this awfully depressing situation, who must be getting some sort of dopamine hit from it or something. 

Well, I’m done with that. It’s stupid. Stop rejoicing in your own misery. Cynicism is a luxury, optimism is both a burden and a duty.

And I do think that this is a problem peculiar to the left. I don't see the same sort of thing in the right. When a loathsome conservative resigns, I see the left-wing press moaning that there'll only be someone worse to replace them. I see bizarre claims that the next election could result in a hung parliament (albeit coming from both political wings, though for different reasons), despite the fact that local elections don't follow national polls that precisely and with Labour still with an enormous national lead. 

I just don't get it. Sure, complaints and criticism can be the engine of social progress. But this kind of ultra-pessimism baffles me. Such an attitude doesn't help achieve anything, it just keeps everyone perpetually miserable. It's weird.

Rant over, you may go about your business. After you watch the episode, of course.